(Remember that forest is also a metaphor for the darkness and the wilderness of the mind.
He paced the palace corridors all day and lay awake on his bed at night, haunted by the wail of widows and orphans. Be a king if it makes you happy don’t be a king if it does not.
So enjoy every moment for there is no tomorrow, no life after death, no soul, no fate, no bondage, no liberation, no God. The point is to make the most of life – enjoy it, celebrate it, learn from it, make sense of it, share it with fellow human beings – so that when death finally comes, it will not be such a terrible thing.”Ī Charvaka, one who does not believe in the existence of anything spiritual or metaphysical, shouted from the city square, “Yes, Yudhishtira, life has no point at all. Vidura spoke solemnly to his nephew, “Everybody dies – some suddenly, some slowly, some painfully, some peacefully. When I sit on a pile of corpses, how can I drink the cup of success? What is the point of it all?” “My hands are soaked with the blood of my family. The eldest Pandava had lost all interest in kingship. Yudhistira is so upset about the destruction and loss of life during the war that he is unwilling to be crowned king and he is given a lesson the point of life: One is advised in many parts of India to eat sugar when agry, just like Gandhari did, so as not to end up cursing the Pandavas. Once expressed, rage dissipates and reason returns. In another instance, I have started to differentiate when a person is in anger and says things that I should not pay attention to whereas when they are genuinely upset with something I did or didn’t do:ĭhritarashtra expresses it by crushing the iron effigy of Bhima while Gandhari expresses it by burning Yudhistira’s toe with a glance. To live in dharma is to have others as a reference point, not oneself.įunction therefore in this war not like that insecure dog that barks to dominate and whines when dominated, but like that secure cow, that provides milk freely and follows the music of the divine.ĭo you fight this war to break the stranglehold of jungle law in human society, Arjuna? If not, you do not practise karma yoga.Īs an aside, you also get to know why the cow is considered sacred. To live in dharma is to live without fear.
Humans alone of all living creatures can reject the law of the jungle and create a code of conduct based on empathy and directed at discovering the meaning of life. When Subramaniam Swamy says “we are fighters.For fighters for dharma there is always hope.” after the recent Presidential election, he is probably referring to is this quote by Krishna regarding Dharma: Those interpretations put the stories in context – there is the usual intended “moral of the story”, but there is also cultural, political and religious explanations and sometimes simply how stories were changed to possibly cover up or make a story suitable for hearing by subsequent generations. Many of my realizations or understandings in the book came about because of the ‘interpretations’ by Devdutt after each story. There is far more wisdom and far more to learn in older stuff than the newer stuff which tends to be mostly regurgitations. So far, it’s been working out well, but that is a perpetual battle of focus. So I should take heart in it and figure out what are the age-old approaches to overcoming this hassled life.Ĭoincidentally, this has been part of my initiative to “read older”, I’m trying to cut down on reading “newer tweets” and instead read “older books” and “older papers”, etc.
While I did not find the answer to it in the Mahabharata, I did come to the stark realization that this has been the way for generations and has been so since the age of the Mahabharata. Why is it that we are all screwed up in so many little ways? Whether it is lack of trust or lack of intimacy or lack of friends or lack of self-confidence or lack of support or lack of pleasantries or lack of humanity… so on. If only we could be a little more human towards each other and lead a “normal” pleasant life. Think about how it applies to every minor situation in every minute in the office and at home or on a bigger scale at the level of states and nations. The most important lesson reinforced was that life is meaningless (there is no grand plan), our greatest challenge is leading a “normal life with values” and to be human to each other.